Dr.
Themelis is a graduate of McGill University in chemical and metallurgical
engineering. In the first part of his career, he directed the
R&D of a multi-billion U.S. corporation (Kennecott Corp.).
He joined Columbia in 1980 and is past chair of the Henry Krumb
School of Mines and also of the Department of Earth and Environmental
Engineering, and founder and current director of Columbia’s
Earth Engineering Center (www.columbia.edu/cu/earth).

In
addition to his teaching at Columbia (transport and chemical rate
phenomena, reactor design, industrial ecology), Dr. Themelis has
been consultant to industry, government and NGOs in the areas
of process design and management of technical resources. He is
member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, of the New
York Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the Minerals, Metals, and
Materials Society, Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada
and member of ISWA, SWANA, ASME International, Air and Waste Management
Association, AEESP and other organizations.

Prof.
Themelis is Chair and co-founder, with Maria Zannes of IWSA, of
the Waste to Energy Research and Technology Council (www.columbia.edu/cu/wtert),
an international consortium of universities, companies and other
organizations concerned with materials and energy recovery from
solid wastes. He is the recipient of several professional awards,
author of 180 technical papers and books and inventor of about
twenty patents related to high temperature processing. Current
research work is on integrated waste management and the design
of processes for material and energy recovery from used products.

Two gold medals of the
Metallurgical Society of the AIME for best papers published
(1968, 1973); ERCO award of the Canadian Society of Chemical
Engineering (1971).

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Best Paper award of the
Canadian Metallurgical Society (1993).

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Extractive Metallurgy Lecturer
of AIME (1972),

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McConnell Environmental
Award of the AIME (1984)

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Columbia University 1987
Kohnstamm Prize for Industrial Chemistry

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1987 Lecturer of the British
Institution of Mining and Metallurgy.

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1993 Best Paper Award,
Metallurgical Society of Canadian Institute of Mining and
Metallurgy

In
recent years, Prof. Themelis has directed his research and educational
efforts towards the subject of industrial ecology as it applies
to the intereffects between the provision of essential materials
to humanity (minerals, fuels, water) and environmental quality.
At Columbia, he led the transformation of the historic School
of Mines to the new engineering discipline of Earth and Environmental
Engineering (http://www.seas.columbia.edu/krumb/).